Today’s Key Takeaways: Swing state voters focused on energy policies. Saudi Arabia warns of $50 oil. Clean energy transition needs fossil fuels – report. Judge Gleason sides with anti-development crowd -again.
NEWS OF THE DAY:
Swing states hurting from inflation, want more from Trump, Harris on energy policies
Casey Harper, The Center Square, October 1, 2024
Swing state voters are feeling the pain of high prices and want to hear more from presidential candidates about their energy policies, newly released polling data shows.
A new Morning Consult/American Petroleum Institute poll obtained exclusively by The Center Square surveyed registered voters in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
While economists have heralded the slowing of inflation, Tuesday’s poll shows that swing state voters still are feeling the pain.
In the swing states, anywhere from 81% to 86% said the price of daily necessities has become “financially painful,” and anywhere from 88% to 94% said they are “concerned” about inflation.
While inflation has slowed from its feverish pace in 2022, prices have risen more than 20% since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the White House.
The poll comes ahead of the vice-presidential debate Tuesday night, where Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will take to the debate stage in their first, and likely only, debate.
Currently, Real Clear Politics polling average in recent weeks have shown while these states may trend toward one candidate or the other, they are still within the margin of error and too close to call.
Notably, the vast majority of voters in those swing states said more domestic oil and natural gas production would lower costs. Anywhere from 80% to 87% of those surveyed support more domestic energy production over more foreign production.
The poll also asked registered voters: “Do you support or oppose government mandates that would ban gas stoves, gas furnaces or new gasoline, diesel and hybrid vehicles?”
In all seven polled swing states, a majority of voters opposed the idea. A handful of proposed government mandates are on track to do just that, though, with federal and state regulators publicly discussing a potential ban on gas stoves.
OIL:
Saudi Arabia Warns Oil Prices Could Drop to $50
Charles Kennedy, OilPrice.Com, October 2, 2024
- Saudi Arabia is threatening to take back market share and ditch its unofficial $100 oil price target.
- The Kingdom is warning OPEC+ members who are not complying with their output quotas.
- Iraq, Kazakhstan, and Russia have been major overproducers.
Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has warned fellow OPEC+ ministers that if other producers continue to flout their output quotas in the agreement, oil prices could slump to $50 per barrel, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing OPEC delegates who attended a conference call last week.
The warning from the most influential minister of the OPEC+ alliance was interpreted by other producers as a veiled threat that Saudi Arabia is fed up with quota cheaters and could go for a price war to defend its market share, the Journal’s sources said.
The message from the Saudi minister was that “there is no point in adding more barrels if there isn’t room for them in the market,” a delegate who attended last week’s call told the Journal.
“Some better shut up and respect their commitments toward OPEC+,” was the message from OPEC’s top producer and leader, Saudi Arabia, according to the source.
GAS:
Clean energy transition requires natural gas — report
Mika Travis, E & E News, September 30, 2024 (subscription required)
The fossil fuel is the ideal backup power source — and will be for a long time, according to the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
The “fastest and most efficient transition” to renewable energy requires using natural gas for backup power, according to a new report.
The report, published Monday by the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, says that natural gas should not supplement clean power forever, as the end goal is to reach net-zero emissions. But it finds that relying solely on wind and solar energy production, which varies day to day and seasonally, could cause grid instability without a sufficient backup source.
“We don’t want to be in a position 20 years from now where we’ve committed to wind and solar and, suddenly, we don’t have power,” said Robin Gaster, the report’s author, and director of research at ITIF’s Center for Clean Energy Innovation. “We have to keep the lights on.”
Wind and solar power can falter when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun is behind clouds. The report asserts that natural gas is the ideal backup power source because it can be ramped up to full capacity quickly and the infrastructure already exists to deliver it at a large scale.
MINING:
Federal judge faults environmental analysis for planned huge gold mine in Western Alaska
Yereth Rosen, Alaska Beacon, October 1, 2024
Regulators violated laws when they failed to consider impacts of a catastrophic dam failure before issuing a key permit for the controversial Donlin mine, the judge rules
Opponents of the planned Donlin Gold mine in Western Alaska won a key victory on Monday when a federal judge ruled that regulators who granted a permit needed to build the project failed to properly consider the risks of a catastrophic release of mine waste.
U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason agreed with tribal government plaintiffs that argued the environmental study that led to federal permitting for the Donlin mine illegally omitted analysis of the impacts of a major tailings dam failure.
“I think it’s a major victory for the tribes and for the region,” said Hannah Foster, an attorney from the environmental organization Earthjustice, which is representing tribal governments fighting against the mine.
At issue was the environmental impact statement on which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers relied when it issued a key permit in 2018 for construction of the gold mine, which would be one of the biggest in the world.
The environmental impact statement should have fully analyzed the possibility of a breach in the 471-foot-tall dam planned to hold hundreds of millions of tons of tailings, which are the crushed pieces of rock leftover after minerals have been extracted.
The environmental impact statement listed the risk of a catastrophic failure was 0.5% per year, or 2% over 20 years. But the Corps failed to consider the outcome of such a spill, an omission that Gleason said violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
“To borrow an analogy from Plaintiffs and to put these numbers into perspective, these same odds for the risk of an airplane crash would likely deter nearly anyone from flying. Because a tailings spill larger than .5% of the total tailings volume is reasonably foreseeable, the (final environmental impact statement) should have considered a larger spill,” Gleason said in her ruling.
Gleason’s ruling stopped short of striking down the permit entirely, which is what the plaintiffs had requested. Instead, she gave both sides the opportunity to argue further about how the response to deficiencies in the environmental impact statement should be carried out.